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A
survey of the first thirty years of American Independent Filmmaking. Ray
Carney wrote the essay on this page surveying the early years of the American
independent movement for a Spanish film encyclopedia. It has never been
published in English.

American Narrative Art Film:The First Thirty Years, 1949-1979, Part One

The most important fact for a European
reader to keep in mind is simply that there is no narrative art film tradition
in America comparable to what exists in Italy, France, Germany, or Spain. For all but a handful of American viewers and critics,
narrative film is Hollywood. The major studios and
distributors have, in effect, succeeded in defining narrative film in
their own terms. Between the studio publicists (who fill every available
minute of television and radio time and every available inch of newspaper
and magazine column space with advertising for their "product")
and the reviewers in the mass media (whose battles with each other for
viewership and readership encourage them to
review only what the largest possible audience is already interested in
as a result of the saturation advertising campaigns of the major releases),
there is neither journalistic nor imaginative space left for alternatives
to Hollywood filmmaking.

It might be thought that that is precisely
where critics and reviewers come in--to call audiences to higher, more
enduring values. However, the sad reality is that very few reviewers dare
to buck the box office trends for fear of getting too far ahead of their
audiences. Pauline Kael's reply to a question
in a private conversation can stand as a summary of how completely the
commercial tail wags the critical dog in America (and is all the more
telling insofar as Kael was generally regarded
as being among the most "high-toned" of American reviewers).
Asked why, in more than twenty years of reviewing for The New Yorker,
she had never discussed a single film by Tarkovsky,
nor even mentioned the work of a host of important American art filmmakers,
she nearly shouted her answer--"You think my readers go to films
like that? They're not interested in those
sorts of movies!"--as if that explained everything. When critics rely
on market values to justify their positions, it is obvious that the triumph
of the marketplace is more or less complete.

I would note parenthetically that not
even the very concept I am invoking--"the independent narrative art
film"--is safe from commercial debasement. In a process that began
in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was completed by around 1985, the
term was gradually transformed from a meaningful way of identifying a small body of
crucially important work that exists as an alternative to mainstream filmmaking, into an advertising slogan used to promote big-budget
entertainment films. After the mid-1980s, the term was routinely and uncritically used to describe the multimillion dollar productions
of figures like David Putnam, Oliver Stone, Paul Mazursky,
and Sidney Lumet. The concept has been so drained of meaning at present
that when Robert Wise described himself as an "independent art filmmaker"
at a recent Sundance Institute symposium on the subject, no one laughed,
and only one person in the audience (Stan Brakhage)
openly questioned the applicability of the term to the director of West
Side Story and Star Trek--The Motion Picture.

Needless to say, not all American criticism
is commercially compromised, however. Even in such an overwhelmingly market-driven
culture, there are fortunately still a few writers and publications that
function almost completely independently of commercial considerations.
One thinks of figures with the stature of Irving Howe, Saul Bellow, William
Phillips, Richard Poirier, or Hilton Kramer and of serious journals of
ideas and opinion like Partisan Review, Commentary, The
New Criterion, Tikkun, and Raritan. Unfortunately, however, none of these writers or journals,
nor any other equivalent to them, has to my knowledge ever seen fit, even
in a single essay, to take up the cause of American art film. One searches
for reasons why this should be. Part of the neglect is traceable to a
high-art snobbery that still looks down its nose at "movies"
as an artistic poor relation to "real arts" like opera, ballet,
literature, painting, and music. Film simply has not been around long
enough to establish its artistic credentials in the minds of these high-brow
critics, and is consequently relegated to the same critical ghetto where
other artistically unimportant cultural expressions (music videos, television
programs, Broadway plays, advertising campaigns, and fashion trends) are
corralled. But if all film is patronized to some extent by these thinkers,
it is clear that a special scorn is reserved for American film (which
is why, if exceptions are occasionally, though rarely, made in favor of
treating a film as a serious artistic object, they are invariably made
for foreign imports and not home-grown products). The ironic explanation
is that the high-brow writers are (albeit unconsciously) as much under
the thrall of the distributors' publicists and mass-market reviewers as
the average viewer is. The marketing professionals who represent the major
studios and distributors have apparently convinced even the Irving
Howes and Hilton Kramers
that their definition of American film is the only definition there is.
(Note that even when intellectual mavericks like Stanley Cavell,
Fredric Jameson, and Morris Dickstein propose serious artistic interpretations
of American movies, they too invariably take all of their examples from
mainstream movies. Even they are apparently unaware of alternatives to
the major distributors' releases.)

One might imagine that university film
programs and specialized, scholarly film journals would offer a more exalted
vision of film art, but (for a variety of reasons that there is not space
to go into here and now) art has itself become a dirty concept in American
scholarly film criticism. Advanced American film criticism has, for at
least the past twenty years, favored an implicitly sociological approach
that involves treating films either as forms of pop-culture and mass-entertainment,
or as ideological or sociological documents--in the process inadvertently
reinforcing the patronization of film as not being a full-fledged art,
confirming the limiting judgments of those who don't take it seriously
in the first place. Though even as I write it I can still hardly believe
it is true, there is, in fact, not a single university program or film
magazine in America which rigorously upholds a vision of film as an art, or that consistently devotes
itself to the appreciation of the work of filmmakers of the highest artistic
caliber.

When you combine the preceding observations
with the almost complete lack of financial support American art film receives
from governmental or institutional sources like grant agencies, museums,
and archives, and factor in the terrifying economics of film distribution
and publicity in general (economics which are made all the more daunting
for American independent filmmakers not only by the geographical sprawl
of the country, but by the fact that their work has to compete for the
attention of exhibitors, reviewers, and audiences against studio releases
with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and frequently millions of dollars,
in their advertising budgets), it becomes more understandable that the
majority of viewers (and critics) are still unaware that an extraordinary
body of narrative film has been created independent of the large-scale
production and distribution system.

The reason this background sketch is
important is that it is crucial to realize that during its first thirty
years (and to some extent even today) American narrative art film was
created by individuals working stunningly alone, almost entirely unaware
not only of the achievements of previous generations of American narrative
art filmmakers, but also of the work of the filmmakers' own cinematic
contemporaries. I have spoken with virtually all of the filmmakers I am
going to mention, and a surprising number of them admit to being unfamiliar
with the work of the others. (Since the only examples of "art cinema"
screened by most of the American university film programs in the sixties,
seventies, and eighties were works by European filmmakers like Fellini,
Antonioni, Resnais, and Godard, even the American independent directors who had formal
training in film had little or no opportunity to be exposed to the work
of other American independent narrative filmmakers.)

There were two seminal influences on
the first generation of American independent feature filmmakers: American
television and magazine news photography, and the cinematic work of the
Italian neorealists. During the late 1940s and
early 1950s, picture magazines like Life and Look were undergoing
enormous postwar surges in popularity, demonstrating that the small dramas
of an ordinary individual's daily existence, as captured by unposed
"grabbed" photography (made possible by new lightweight photographic
equipment and faster film stocks) could be gripping narrative material.
By coincidence, at approximately the same time, the early masterworks
of Italian neorealism were reaching American repertory movie houses in
subtitled versions. Shoeshine, Bicycle Thief, Umberto
D, La Terra Trema, and Germany, Year Zero,
proved that the filmmaker could emulate the photojournalist with his Leica, leaving the studio behind and venturing out into the
streets and apartments of life, to record what the Hollywood studios had left out of the picture.

In addition, the neorealists demonstrated the expressive possibilities of a
looser, less focused narrative and photographic style than the Hollywood studio style allowed. While Hollywood systematically closed-off the shot and used lights
and framing to focus attention on one spot within the frame, the neorealists opened up the frame space and made its boundaries
permeable by treating the shot as what Bazin
called a "window" on a reality which was larger than it and
overflowed it. In De Sica's work in particular,
visual and emotional distractions, excursuses, and eccentricities were
not screened out of the shot and the plot, but were deliberately included
in.

Beyond being abstractly fitting that
a cinematic movement attempting to escape the imaginative sway of the
studios and the stars should originate three thousand miles from Hollywood, New York City was the specific place that the intertwined influences
of neorealism and photojournalism made themselves felt most powerfully during the late 1940s and early
1950s. Because of the ethnic background of the population, many of whom are first-, second-, or third-generation
European immigrants, the culture of New York has historically been far more in touch with and receptive
to movements in European art and cinema than that of any other city in
the United
States. The
consequence was that the city supported (and still today supports) the
largest number of movie theaters that screen the work of non-Hollywood
directors (including the Italian neorealists)
in America. Even more importantly, New York has been and still is the print and broadcast center
for most of the "hard" news reporting in America (both on television and in magazines). The result is
that New York photographers and writers have traditionally been much
more engaged with the pressing social issues of the day than journalists
in any other American city. (Los Angeles, in contrast, has been the traditional home to fashion and glamour photography and to celebrity
and "soft news" reporting.) The consequence not only that the
New Yorkfilmmakers who launched the American independent narrative movement
had ample opportunity to be exposed to the work of the neorealists, but were motivated by a similar sense of social injustice.
When the first generation of New York independents took their cameras into the streets of the city, they brought their consciences with them.
They consciously rebelled against Hollywood standards of glamour and beauty, calling the viewer's attention to poor
or oppressed figures who were left out of Hollywood productions, focusing on the sights, sounds, and mess of the streets and
neighborhoods of New York.

But even more than being interested in
states of social vulnerability, these filmmakers were interested in capturing
states of imaginative vulnerability. Their work reserves a special tenderness
for all forms of weakness or powerlessness: not only focusing on the wormy
underbelly of American society (the situation of blacks, the homeless,
drunks, and drug addicts), but a variety of forms of imaginative marginality
and susceptibility (ranging from depictions of children and young lovers,
to dramatizations of the situation of young beat generation artists and
young adults floundering about trying to decide who they are).

A
survey of the first thirty years of American Independent Filmmaking. Ray
Carney wrote the essay on this page surveying the early years of the American
independent movement for a Spanish film encyclopedia. It has never been
published in English.